Not quite sure yet how this influences my recent urge to start riding motorcycles.
There seems to be a (near) 1:2 ratio between motorcycle and vehicle fatalities. I already knew motorcycle riders were 5 times more likely to get in accidents, and those accidents were 35 times more likely to result in very serious injury. In my life so far I've been in one small fender bender.
This does confirm some of the self-imposed safety rules I'm planning. No car commercial road joyriding. Lots of yellow in the hills. Highway driving seems to be relatively safe, which is comforting. Extreme caution at intersections (look at the bay bridge on-ramp). No riding at night.
When you cut out really young people, inexperienced riders, people who haven't taken the MSF, intoxicated people and those on 600cc sport bikes... fatalities on a bike go down a great deal.
Many, but not all motorcycle wrecks are preventable. The guy in his mid 50's touring all around the US on his 1800cc Gold Wing is far far far less likely to get killed than a 21 year old who has 'a few drinks', and tries to impress his friends on his 600cc superbike around the city (and not wearing any gear).
Take joy rides. Learn how to use your bike. Hit the mountains. Don't be afraid of cornering- just learn how to do it. Night riding is sub-optimal I will agree, but don't be afraid to just slow down. A country road that I might rip down at 100mph during the day might become a 20mph road for me at night in the fog with bugs, recently rained on roads and deer.
Make sure your bike is well lit and you're wearing all your gear that you can stand to wear. If you're in SF like many people on HN, the weather is amicable to wearing almost full gear every day. In Austin or somewhere else hot, I doubt you could wear full gear in the summer.
I ride a motorcycle. They say if you're a lifetime rider, odds are you are going to get in one major crash in your lifetime. Both my uncles, several neighbors, and my grandfather have been in wrecks (none lethal, thank god), but everyone of them knows someone who died in a motorcycle accident it seems. I dumped my bike once, nothing serious, but I'm still overly cautious while riding.
My big suggestion is to act as if every car is either going to break the law (run stop signs) or not see you, so you've always got to be on the defense.
Other comments on the map, it's kinda odd feeling, finding the places of people you knew who died in a car crash, and seeing them as a statistic.
My favorite bad example is a former kung fu teacher of mine. He was in a motorcycle accident that put him in a wheelchair a number of years ago. He recovered, mostly. And I always had sympathy for him, assuming he was a safe rider.
That is, until he told me the story, and it started with, "I was going 120mph in the left lane on on the LA Freeway one night..."
Don't be that guy, and you'll have much better odds.
Being a rider before I left the Bay Area, it's kind of spooky to look at Highway 9, 84 to La Honda, and Summit road. You can literally see the yellows in the corners, and looking at the map, I can see many of those corners in my mind's eye.
That said, if you spend some time around Hwy 9 on a summer weekend, it shouldn't surprise you that the accident rate is high. If you don't ride like those people, your risk will not mimic the statistics.
Also check out the Angeles Crest highway (just North of Los Angeles), or 'The Dragon' out in the South East. You can trace the roads by the yellow dots.
This does confirm some of the self-imposed safety rules I'm planning.
If you live near a major city, try spending a couple of weeks cycling around it first. You'll learn to spot danger warning signs at much less dangerous speeds :)
Highway / motorway riding is excruciatingly boring, even in the absence of speed limits. I've ridden from London to Kiel in Germany and back a couple of times, via France and Luxembourg, and found it infinitely preferable to avoid motorways, even though it takes 3 days rather than one (long) day per leg. Doing 200km/h+ gets old really fast when you're going in a straight line. If you've got speed limits and intend on mostly highway riding, without a significant filtering component, I wouldn't bother with a bike.
So yes, you'll want to spend some time in the hills and curves. Don't start on an all-out superbike with torque that kicks in suddenly at high revs; start with something with a flatter torque curve, like a midrange twin (e.g. SV650 or Ninja 650r) or detuned 600. An unfaired bike, if you don't mind the looks, will feel faster from the wind blast. Most of the fun in a bike is from acceleration and corners, and on the street rather than on a track you'll want to have that fun at perhaps surprisingly low speeds. Taking a tight corner at 30mph is harder than it looks, takes more skill than a long curve at 90, and is a lot less dangerous if you crash. I've had a low-sider on my scooter (it was new to me and I didn't know its lean angle limits well enough) at about 25mph in a t-shirt and jeans (but full-face helmet, as always), and walked away with nothing more than a scratch on my arm and a few more scratches on the fairing.
You'll remember the first time a corner surprises you by tightening up half-way through. But the real warning signs come earlier than that IMO: if you find yourself letting off the throttle half-way through a turn rather than smoothly accelerating through it, or changing gear half-way through, that's a sign of poor technique and / or poor reading of the road. Even more dangerously, you can end up learning these mid-course correction habits and think you're doing well, building false confidence.
Bikes are fantastic fun and don't let the raw statistics dissuade you too much. You'll see a lot of idiots on the road doing stupid things, and get a better idea of where the stats come from. Filtering, where legal, can be intoxicatingly enjoyable. And you'll appreciate differences in road geography to a huge degree.
I've ridden in Belgium, Netherlands, northern CA, northwest France, Luxembourg, UK and Germany, in approximately increasing order of fun, though for different reasons. Belgium has terrible (back) roads and is mostly flat; northern CA has some very curvy roads, but they are often very narrow, poorly surfaced and have double-yellow no-overtaking lines to an extreme; though it does have filtering. UK also has many fairly poor country roads - a lot of hedges blocking views - but makes up for it with filtering. Germany is strictly anti-filtering, but has very high standards even for curvy minor roads, which are wide and have high speed limits (depending on state).
(I own a scooter and a big bike and live in London. Scooters are better for filtering in the city, and a lot more practical. I don't own a car, and only ever take public transport if I'll be consuming alcohol.)
Friends don't let friends ride Kawasakis, especially Ninjas.
My pet theory is that each motorcycle has a use or personality, and after riding it for a while your behaviour ends up matching the personality of the bike.
BMW tourers make you want to ride the curves from coast to coast, but do so safely. They don't mind a bit of speed, but are also content to cruise at legal limits.
Harleys want you to cruise the straight desolate highways, without a helmet (dumb, but if you are going to ride without a helmet, the a straight desolate highway is the place to do it). They also like being polished and sitting in front of cafes.
A trail bike wants you to turn left up that hill, and go explore, while a top end enduro bike wants you to do that a bit too quickly. A KTM adventure (I have one) wants you to load it up and blast across a desert, and does so remarkably well.
Sports bikes, and the Ninja is the worst no matter what the size, want you to crouch down and go as fast as possible. They eat away at your soul, and you just have to go faster and faster. There's a bad ending waiting for you, especially for early career riders.
So buy a bike that matches your use case.
The upright road/trail bike with a top box is an excellent all-round choice for commuting, adventure and a bit of safe speed. (Triumph Tiger, BMW F800GS/F65GS, BMWR1200GS, Yamaha XT etc). A sport bike is great if you are able to use it on a track, or for the occasional blast in the desolate hills. A laid back cruiser needs wide open spaces and lots of cafes - they are not about safe speed or twisties.
But the ultimate use for a bike is travel, and the further the better. Get something you are comfortable on for hours, and which has the ability to go on anywhere.
I'd recommend a Ducati Monster 620 Dark, circa 2004 - 2006. It offers an incredibly wide torque curve so traffic isn't a chore, very low center of gravity saddle, relatively upright riding position, naked bike for more interest at lower speeds, and a very easy but engaging ride. All this in a package that won't "eat your soul", but instead offers classic beautiful Italian machine lines. Price is right too.
That said, I now ride an MV Agusta F4 Brutale, which seems to offer sport bike performance without the soul eating. There's never, ever, an urge to ride wheelies downtown to show off your uber Ninja neon green decals.
A Ninja 650r is not a Ninja like a ZX-R. It has the Ninja name in the US, but it is not a supersport bike; it's a sport tourer. It's a parallel twin, and is actually less aggressive to ride than the Suzuki SV650 - it doesn't even have clip-on handlebars. It has an upright seating position, not crouched over. At 70bhp it's got lower power than most of the detuned 600cc inline-4 standards.
Personally, I don't like dual-purpose bikes. I think they're too tall, and I never have need nor desire to go off-road in the least; for me, sport-touring is optimal. I think dual-purpose bikes are a bit like urban 4x4s: most never go off-road, and when they do, they're not actually very good at it. But of course this is a personal preference.
Great - the Ninja 650r sounds like a good commuter bike then, and 60-70HP is a good range for a road bike. (I'm based in NZ - not the US market)
Dual purpose bikes are indeed harder to approach - the 1200GS Adventure I own is a huge tall and bulky machine. It took me a long time to get into them, and I started out with the smaller 650 GS series. They are however remarkably easy to ride, and to do so in almost any condition. They make great commuter bikes as you are much higher and generally have great luggage capacity and robustness for the occasional spill.
However you are essentially right - they are not as good as a pure-purpose bike for a particular application. You can dial in your degree of off and on roadability. KTM does the best hard core adventure series, while take your pick for the soft roaders of dubious merit.
If you do get into it then BMW run excellent (though rare) off road courses. We all had our bikes, mine a 1200GS, fully airborne on several occasion on my course. And there's a really scary photo from that same course on my eponymous blog header.
It's funny that you recommend a twin 650 or mono 600 as a starter bike. Not so long ago, these would be considered big boy bikes, suicidal for a beginner. I wonder what changed, the simple availability of bigger bikes or the improvement of bike safety ?
As for me, I'd recommend a tiny 250cc or even 125cc for a starter. A year or two later, you can always get a bigger one safely.
I'd recommend a 125cc for learning basic roadcraft too, particularly if you aren't riding in the US. But the US is highly car-oriented, with a lot of big wide roads and impatient people driving automatics. It's not necessarily easy to go safely from A to B on a bike that has a hard time exceeding 55mph and takes its time getting there. So I think a starting out on a bigger bike makes sense in the US. Not that it's less dangerous than it used to be; rather, that the alternative, annoying the drivers behind and around you, is even worse.
I rode a 125cc scooter for over a year before I got a 125cc geared bike, and rode that for about 6 months before I got an ER6f (the same thing as the Ninja 650r), and my current scooter is an SH300. There are lots of things you learn about on a smaller bike, particularly in the city: observations, road positioning, hazards. Pedestrians, cyclists and cars emerging from gaps in traffic without warning. Truckers stopping to let a pretty girl cross the road while you're going down the inside bus lane, and of course you can neither see over nor through a truck. In the city, you learn to be acutely suspicious of gaps forming and avoid riding close to stopped cars, whether parked or not.
But many of these things are either specific to big city navigation and filtering, or you would learn in a car in any case. In a typical American city, you don't have the kind of filtering you see in London, much less somewhere like Taipei, and you can take for granted that the guy considering getting a bike can drive and probably has for many years.
Furthermore, there's a whole other level of learning that only happens when you're on a big bike. A 125cc geared bike is so incredibly light - it's almost like a bicycle - that you have no worries about dropping it when stopping using poor technique - braking with the front while turning, for example. And it has so little torque you'll never notice a cold rear tire slipping out on an aggressive corner, because outside of gravel on the road or wet manhole covers, it'll never happen. Not to say it can't be fun. I had plenty of launch practice: hi-rev clutch-slipping to clutchless shifting, eking out every scrap of acceleration I could. But it's not long before the stuff you're learning isn't transferable to a big bike.
So I think it depends on how much road experience you have, where you're riding, and what kind of riding you plan on doing (cities favour smaller bikes). A modern 250 or 500 probably would make a better beginner's bike. But 500cc bikes are pretty rare these days, and while 250cc are just on the edge of enough power, I don't think you'd want to have one for more than a few months, unless you're using it as an alternative to a scooter in the city.
What happened is basically a 650 twin or 600 single makes half the power of a 600 four (and with a more friendly torque curve), so they are offered up as a compromise- 'It's not as tame as a EX250, but at least it's not a ZX6R'.
As a bonus, they are honestly very solid balanced bikes you could ride your whole riding career. The EX250's have notable shortcomings if you will only own one bike, for many years. I certainly advise starting on a smaller bike and upgrading, but many people obstinately refuse that course. I'm not sure if they are afraid of losing money in the process, or if it's an ego thing.
The manufacturers haven't produced small bikes for a while, other than dirt bikes. There's only a handful of small street bikes being produced, like the Ninja 250 and the Night Hawk.
For an alternative perspective, I much prefer riding a cruiser style bike on straight, flat, empty highways in rural USA. Many Harley enthusiasts seem to feel the same way.
I hear you man. For me, a 4-5 hour ride on the highway on some beautiful country is better than a week's vacation. Some good noise-isolating headphones (I had a loud bike), relaxing music, and some nice breaks at cheap gas stations for a drink here & there --- that's just perfect.
Harley rider here. I'm with you. I like to be able to look around a little bit rather than be forced to watch for sudden turns all the time.
I did have a ninja zx6r for a few years, and it was a lot of fun. And I did prefer the curvy roads with that bike. Rides were short and intense, like a roller coaster.
But if I'm going on a 500 mile ride, I don't want it to be a roller coaster. Or even a 50 mile ride for that matter.
Something like 70% of single-vehicle motorcycle collisions involve alcohol, so that's the big one to avoid. Here are my tips, from 17 years of riding and commuting by motorcycle:
* Avoid alcohol before riding (edit: personally, I never ride within six hours of consuming any alcohol).
* Wear high-quality, full-body protective gear.
* Avoid rush hour when possible, particularly evening rush hour when drivers are tired, cranky, and aggressively want to get home.
* Absolutely avoid riding during drunk hours. Basically, stay off the streets after 9pm on Friday and Saturday, and stay away from sporting events, concerts, etc.
Go outside and have a good look at the surface of the road. Remember when you were a kid, how much it hurt if you were running and fell and skinned your knees? Now imagine running flat out and diving face first onto the road - feel the asphalt tearing your legs and arms
Now imagine the same thing, but this time you're travelling at 30mph
The difference between having large amounts of your skin literally ripped away and replaced with deeply embedded rocks and dirt (and quite possibly several weeks in hospital) and just getting up again and continuing on your way? Boots, helmet, gloves and leathers
To contribute to the part about skin ripping away- when your speed is great enough, and thereby the friction and the heat... your skin does something called "sheeting".
That is to say, it just comes off in sheets, like how you take off your t-shirt.
I emphasize that enough - riding after any alcohol is temporary citizenship.
But aside from not drinking or rising like an idiot the biggest thing we motorcyclists can do to increase our safety is to wear a high visibility jacket. It creates a noticeable difference in the percentage of other road users that see you, which addresses the major cause of accidents. Protective gear is a last resort - it's better to avoid the accident in the first place.
The best protective gear is the stuff you wear, so for short trips if you are tempted to leave the heavy gear behind, at least throw on a light flouro jacket.
I see increasing numbers of riders with high-visibility gear. I've always been a fan, so I'm happy to see it. However, I've noticed that, more often than not, very little of the jacket/pants are actually visible when the rider is on the move. The helmet and shoulders are the most visible in oncoming traffic, and all too often the shoulders will be some darker color, meant to contrast with the high-viz torso and arms!
High-viz gear will unquestionably help with traffic to your sides and behind you, but I think a high-viz helmet is significantly more valuable than a jacket, and a modulated (flashing) headlight is more valuable than either, from the front.
I'm of the opinion that learning solid skills and practicing them regularly will contribute far more to healthy and longevity than gear alone. By skills, I mean more than just stopping and turning, I also mean the ability to read traffic and maintain focused awareness of absolutely everything around you.
By the way, my favorite piece of gear is my one-piece Aerostich Roadcrafter. Some elements of the design are getting outdated, but I'm literally able to put it on or take it off in under ten seconds, and the one-piece design means I always wear full protection. I would choose a different two-piece for touring, but for everyday riding, the Roadcrafter is hard to beat.
We could go back and forth - but essentially we are in agreement. I've ridden around the world in crazy situations, and still get surprised at what traffic can do. The awareness and skills are paramount. High viz only works when you can see it, and great riding suits are worth the incredible expense.
An upright posture on the right bike will get you seen pretty easily, especially at night. Police (at least in most countries) generally do a great job of being seen and protected.
I think a per-person version of this chart would be interesting as well, dividing the map into regions, counting the number of accidents, and dividing it by the number of people in the region. Placement of accidents is less interesting than chance you will have an accident if you live there IMO. Still cool though :)
For a benchmark for comparison, the design firm Fathom made a map consisting of only the roads of the US and no other geographical features. It's also an awesome poster I have up in my room. It's interesting to overlay these two maps with each other.
Very well done. It would be interesting to have the ability to click on one of the reports and get details--something I'm sure you would have done if it was available or possible.
Toggling each type on/off might be interesting as well.
I was immediately curious if there is a cluster of bicyclist fatalities anywhere. I clicked on the icons in the key expecting to change the visibility of each category, but that did nothing.
some sort of heatmap where number of deaths are normalized with respect to vehicle density (or I guess just population). That would give an idea of which states/regions/roads are more treacherous or have more dangerous drivers.
Vehicle density is itself a cause of increased accidents. If you normalized by it you would lose accuracy.
To make it more clear, 10 cars on the same road would increase the chance of an accident non-linearly. It would be more than 10x more likely to have an accident occur there simply because there is more chaos.
I really wish maps like these would display their data on cartograms related to population - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram. The open west always makes my eye come up with false conclusions at first glance.
That said, it's always useful to have data be relative to population rather than absolute, if it is a relative number. I don't think that's valid in this case, because these aren't accidents 'of the population' - they're accidents of people traveling on roads, which is entirely different.
If the coloring were relative to traffic density or throughput, that'd be better.
I saw the death of a motorist. We were on the mountains, he was at more than 120mph in the straight part of the road(he passed over us), and as he took a curve super fast, a van appeared on the other side of the road. Instant dead, looking at him was the most horrible vision in my life. His friends(also riders) will came later and cry.
It is strange, three people I knew from my college died on a very small motorcycle with a very small curb on the road(two young girls and one boy, no helmet). I could not believe it, it made no sense for three people to die on such a small danger(I have seen MBT riders so much times do things x10000 more dangerous).
Four young men and women from my village also died as they return from a Spanish fiesta on the night.
In the North of Spain and Portugal non official "rallies" are the first cause of dead on young people.
What is strange is that until looking at this map, I strangely believed those accidents were "special", but it seems there are not.
I was involved in an accident where I caused a fatality in 1999 (guy sleeping in my lane on a rural highway at 3am), so it's not on here. Otherwise I would be able to say something about its accuracy and completeness.
I find this a little... disquieting... I know the story behind a dozen or so of these little icons. Like any traumatic event, they'll come to mind from time to time (some are more memorable than others, for some reason). Being reminded of all of them at once is actually a little overwhelming.
It's also a bit of a disconnect seeing the chaos and trauma of some of those scenes reduced to a tiny graphic.
Very awkward to see the number of deaths that I drive past daily...
Even more awkward to think I could have been a statistic on this site a few years ago!
The searching functionality could use some work. I was unable to input the actual address of my accident and had to guess-timate. Like others said, filtering would be highly appreciated as well.
It's only because there are a lot of pedestrians in urban areas, not because urban areas are more dangerous for pedestrians (in fact they are probably less dangerous).
Without some way to control for density of cars/pedestrians, this chart is quite useless.
A car can kill a pedestrian/bicyclist/motorcyclist at surprisingly low speeds. It's almost impossible to kill someone in a car at under 25 MPH or so (unless they drive off a cliff or something), but pedestrians can be killed by cars going as slowly as 10 MPH (they get knocked off their feet and hit their heads, usually). I read a very interesting paper by the NTSB or IIHS about that, but can't find it now.
Pedestrian and bicycle fatalities outnumber car occupant fatalities in Manhattan for this reason.
I saw a billboard last time I drove through NYC, explaining why the speed limit is 35 rather than 45. It basically said that if a car hits a pedestrian going 35, the pedestrian will probably live, but if a car hits a pedestrian going 45, the pedestrian will probably die.
There's a link to the NHTSA pick-a-checkbox data finder, but here's the link to the FTP site for the raw data:
ftp://ftp.nhtsa.dot.gov/fars/
Maps like these are visually interesting, but I think a stats analysis of the many characteristics the data include, such as previous DUI offenses and weather conditions, could be even more fascinating.
The age of pedestrians killed in accidents was surprising to me. Of course I didn't do an exhaustive scan, but everywhere I looked they were much older than I imagined they'd be. Many seniors.
I would love to see this map annotated with fatalities involving blood alcohol content > 0.08. Not sure if that information is made available though...
I can tell you, having lived my whole life in Modesto, the drivers here are IDIOTS. I once saw a car that careened off a perfectly straight road, 90 degrees, over the sidewalk and into a fence.
Well, it was mostly in jest, yes, but I think it's more than just that, I think it's also that here on the west coast we tend to drive a lot better than people in New York ;)
I live in Manhattan, grew up in the Midwest, went to college in the South, and have accumulated a couple thousand miles of driving in southern California.
While New York drivers are definitely aggressive, accelerating and braking quickly and making sharp, relatively high-G turns, they are also generally polite, focused, good drivers. They let people in when they need to be let in, they take turns when they need to take turns, they don't run lights, they don't tailgate at high speed, they (usually) use their signals, and they are defensive about pedestrians. They have to be this way to survive the traffic conditions in Manhattan and its freeways: if you don't stay on your game, you get into an accident really quickly. If you get over the aggressive aspect, I think they're some of the better drivers I've encountered.
Southern California, by contrast, always drives me insane. Drivers there just don't seem to think about the implications of what they're doing: they tailgate at 80 MPH, they won't let you in if they don't have to, they definitely won't yield to pedestrians if there's not a stark reason to. I've even seen a collection of cars on I-105 honk maniacally while weaving all over and nearly smashing a poor car that had a blow-out rather than make room for him to get off the road and other drivers to navigate around, even though there was plenty of time to see what was going on, slow down, and work around him. The nearest equivalent I've seen in New York, where a car was stalled out on the FDR (a comically narrow three-lane highway down the east side of Manhattan), had cars slowing down and letting traffic cleanly merge around the disabled automobile.
I don't know why there's such a stark difference. I suspect it has to do with a mixture of west coast drivers driving more, and therefore feeling more comfortable in their cars, combined with wider roads, higher speed limits, and fewer pedestrians. But I think both that New York drivers get a bad rap, and at least southern Californian drivers get an overly good score, when people discuss west- v. east-coast drivers.
I can't argue with that. Southern California has some horrible drivers.
Also, we have highways. Lots and lots of highways. Big ones, 6 lanes each way in some places. But SoCal has major deadlock problems during rush hour. The rest of the time they're just total dicks to everyone else.
Something I've noticed in Canada - is each province despises the drivers of the province to their east. So BC complains about Alberta, Alberta about Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan about Manitoba... and so on. Seems the same thing happens west to east down there too.
This is a horrifying thought. The west coast drivers in Colorado are absolutely horrid, I guess it's a good thing we don't have many New Yorkers then ;).
More so east-coast roads. It seems to me like the west coast has more traffic-calming devices (though my experience there is limited to two weeks of bicycling in Seattle and Portland). Our idea of "traffic calming" on the east coast is to add strobe lights to traffic signals.
I dunno, east-coasters seem to have more road rage too. When you get to New York, people are completely and utterly pissed at eachother. Every time I go to Chicago, I notice that drivers all seem to have this underlying urge to kill all pedestrians which we don't get in California.
I spent a weekend in Chicago and saw more pedestrians in near-death situations than in the rest of my life, cumulative. Where on Earth does that come from?
There seems to be a (near) 1:2 ratio between motorcycle and vehicle fatalities. I already knew motorcycle riders were 5 times more likely to get in accidents, and those accidents were 35 times more likely to result in very serious injury. In my life so far I've been in one small fender bender.
This does confirm some of the self-imposed safety rules I'm planning. No car commercial road joyriding. Lots of yellow in the hills. Highway driving seems to be relatively safe, which is comforting. Extreme caution at intersections (look at the bay bridge on-ramp). No riding at night.